[Sigia-l] Intelligent signs at Microsoft

[Dwayne King]

You're touching on an that is near and dear to my hear, so forgive me
if my response is not as tempered as I'd like.

I see 2 large problems with IA that are very difficult for me to reconcile. 

1) Everything we produce is dead at the moment of client sign-off.
While requirements, use cases, technical specifications have found a
way to live throughout the life of a project, on a universal scale we
have not. On most projects, I hand off my documentation, it is rebuilt
and my documents at that point are dead documents.

2)  Our process depends on the IA. While there are certainly nuances
in the RUP, for the most part a requirements analysis is a
requirements analysis, Use cases are Use cases, object diagrams are
object diagrams, etc. etc. In IA a wireframe is whatever the IA
perceives a wire frame to be (author of this note included). \

So, what I'm getting at is that I agree with Listera what this guy is
doing is a step. Does it look perfect,I don't think so. But, it's
forward momentum. We need to look towards creating living documents
that are standardized. Note: my critique of the IA community should be
tempered with the fact that programers have had the last 40 some odd
years to figure this all out, while, to my knowledge, IA has only been
a discipline for just shy of a decade. I think we're making good
progress when benchmarked against other disciplines in their quest to
find process.

Lastly, to you point of "Programmers can't design, and designers can't
program." I sure hope you're wrong, because if you're right, I'm out a
job. As a programmer that's trying to design, I'm not sure I can
dispute your claim that I can't, but I sure hope you're wrong.

</rant>
Dwayne 


On 8/15/05, Terrence Wood <tdw at funkive.com> wrote:
> Well I hope it does a better job than MS Words attempts at producing
> HTML.
> 
> I see a few inherent problems with this approach.
> 
> To summarise:
> 1. Programmers can't design, and designers can't program.
> 2. HTML is structural, Illustrator is visual.
> 3. The 4th dimension is not represented in Illustrator.
> 
> 
> It's true XUL and MXML are both programming languages that can draw
> interfaces, but generally you need to be a programmer to use them. The
> rub is that *generally* programmers can't design interfaces for an
> audience of non-programmer types, and designers can't program. In broad
> strokes it comes down to the nature of the activity each discipline
> undertakes: programming considers edge cases and all the possible
> permutations of a system, design is concerned with the reduction of
> complexity into constituents understood by the masses.
> 
> Just like with Word, translation from one form to another requires a
> level of robustness in the originating document that is really
> achieved. HTML is a structural language, and requires a structural
> source, whereas most documents are created purely in the visual plane,
> and UI's most certainly will be.
> 
> Wireframes can be used to describe interaction but how do you marry
> that programmatically with a 2 dimensional visual representation of the
> UI? Generally it requires alot of imagination to communication the idea
> of interaction before building it.
> 
> 
> kind regards
> Terrence Wood.
> 
> On 16 Aug 2005, at 6:56 AM, Listera wrote:
> 
> > This is a perennial quest here: how does one turn wireframes, UI
> > prototypes,
> > etc., done in a drawing app like Illustrator directly into functional
> > markup, thereby eliminating the step where programmers essentially
> > recreate
> > the drawings.
> >
> > Behold:
> >
> > <http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archive/2005/07/12/438178.aspx>
> >
> > Michael Swanson at Microsoft (OK, on his own at nights) figured out a
> > way to
> > output XAML from Illustrator. XAML is MSFT's declarative markup
> > language
> > (like XUL in Moz and MXML in Flash/Flex) that'll drive graphics in the
> > upcoming Longhorn/Vista.
> >
> > So if MSFT actually figures out the next intelligent step and can plug
> > in
> > Illustrator output into XAML coding/authoring IDE, things would be
> > interesting, to say the least.
> >
> > Ziya
> > Nullius in Verba
> 
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